To anyone who still feels that there must be an identity of logical form between language and reality, I can only plead that the c...onception of language as a mirror of reality is radically mistaken. We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut knows that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience. But in order to do so, it is enough that it should be apt for the expression of everything that is or might be the case. To be content with less would be to be satisfied to be inarticulate; to ask for more is to desire the impossible. No roads lead from grammar to metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing t...hat the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Fantasy is a product of thought, Imagination of sensibility. If the thinking, discursive mind turns to speculation, the result is ...Fantasy; if, however, the sensitive, intuitive mind turns to speculation, the result is Imagination. Fantasy may be visionary, but it is cold and logical. Imagination is sensuous and instinctive. Both have form, but the form of Fantasy is analogous to Exposition, that of Imagination to Narrative.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Classical art, in a word, stands for form; romantic art for content. The romantic artist expects people to ask, What has he got to... say? The classical artist expects them to ask, How does he say it?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic ...statements, which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where ...you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets--no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The question of "unreality" ... is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt w...ith this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The reason that I call my doctrine logical atomism is because the atoms that I wish to arrive at as the sort of last residue in an...alysis are logical atoms and not physical atoms. Some of them will be what I call 'particulars'Msuch things as little patches of color or sounds, momentary things--and some of them will be predicates or relations and so on.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »